Pronunciation teaching can be a joy, but we need to get away from listen-and-repeat routines and approach it from fresh angles. In this lively presentation, we will try out a variety of activities, from puzzles and games to workouts and raps. There's a PDF of the slides below, as well as the backing rhythm used in the rap. Thanks to Sergio Juan Gomez for the photo!

Pronunciation work can be the most enjoyable part of a lesson but for this to happen, we need to move beyond ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and instead explore language together with our students in a spirit of collaborative discovery. In this session, I will demonstrate examples of how I think this can be done.

Last class, a South Korean student told me about his weekend visit to Liverpool. He said it wasn’t easy to understand the local way of speaking, and gave the example of the question word What? He demonstrated how this word had been said, with the final ‘t’ replaced with a silence, or glottal stop, so it sounds like wha’?

This activity is a free sample from PronPack 2: Pronunciation Puzzles. It can be very tricky to distinguish /s/ from /z/ at the end of a word. Try this maze to see if you can do it. If you find it hard, try two strategies:

Many teachers worry about what the best model accent should be, and whether their own accent serves as a suitable model. My argument is that the premise of the question is wrong – there needn’t be a single model accent, and that the teacher’s own accent will usually be the best model, providing that the teacher is an intelligible speaker of English.

English Pronunciation in Use gets a new look this month. The new cover design comes along with a new approach to audio - instead of being on a set of 5 CDs (which were expensive), the audio is now a free online download. Makes the whole package much more affordable.

In speaking styles, there is a continuum between mumbling and rolling your ‘r’s –. What I mean by mumbling here is speaking with as little mouth movement as possible in order to minimize effort on the part of the speaker.